Painting titled Red Barn I by Roy Lichtenstein, 1969
#1 Hospice by the Antlers (Frenchkiss Records)
Hospice is my favorite album of 2009, but there aren't too many people that I'd recommend it to. It's no fun, for one thing. It's a harrowing, wrenching, challenging album, and the story it tells is one that will hit too close to home to many people who have experienced significant personal loss. But that doesn't change the fact that it is the best album I heard this year.
Hospice is the story of its creator, the Antlers' Peter Silberman, but he refuses to tell anyone the story outside of the context of the album. Some probable details of the story can be pieced together from various sources - Silberman moved to New York a while ago and, around that time, a young member of his family passed away from cancer. Silberman was a firsthand witness to this young person's last days and was simultaneously in a very intimate personal relationship with a woman. Reacting to his encounter with terminal illness, Silberman clung to this lover even though their relationship was fundamentally flawed, rushing into commitment and intimacy to escape loneliness and fear but, in the end, the love affair died as well. In the aftermath of death and heartbreak, Silberman withdrew from the world for an extended period, cutting off family and friends at great harm to his personal relationships and emotional well-being.
Hospice was written during this period of withdrawal - reflecting Silberman's sleeping problems during this period, the songs string together into one long fever dream of recollections of his relationship with the dying girl and his lover. It's a home-recorded album of ambient folk and bedroom orchestral pop, constructed with the precision and artistry born of obsession and isolation. Beginning with a quiet pulse that sounds just like a respirator, Hospice blossoms slowly, beginning with its least accessible and most frightening songs. After the ambient intro, "Kettering" features Silberman singing so softly and close to the mike that every sound of his articulating tongue and lips can easily be heard - the intimacy of the recording is immediate, and it's followed immediately by the deafening roar and wail of "Sylvia". The paranoia and dread climax on the seven-minute "Atrophy", and then the light at the tunnel comes in the form of a pure melodic coda, introducing the second part of the album.
The second half of Hospice sees a gradual shift from anger to resignation as the inevitability of death and heartbreak loom and then manifest. "Bear", "Two", and "Shiva" are almost stand-alone pop songs, but it would be criminal to try to disconnect any of these songs from their story. They can be appreciated best after going through the darkness of the album's first four tracks, and the hour-long investment of really listening to the whole album from "Prologue" to "Epilogue" is an experience unlike anything created by other albums that came out this year [insert diatribe about the "post-album era" here].
I was frustrated at first by the odd sonic choices of the album's opening tracks, by the contrasting ambiguity and emotional immediacy of the lyrics, and by Silberman's fluttering falsetto delivery, but I understood and appreciated these choices after listening to Hospice a few times. I wish Silberman hadn't had to go through what he did to create this record, but he made the most of the experience and created something beautiful from the wreckage. The happy ending for Silberman is that the recording of Hospice required him to reach out to musicians and friends for help - the one-man project became a real band, Silberman began to really connect with people again, and now he has found a way to re-contextualize these painful songs into something he can share openly as he tours and plays them for receptive fans.
"Shiva" by the Antlers
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